Sex, Bombs and Burgers (32 page)

The rollout started slowly but ramped up fast. In 2004 American forces had 162 robots in Iraq and Afghanistan; by the end of 2008, they had more than six thousand.
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At first, the robots came in cave-exploration and bomb-disposal forms (like iRobot’s PackBot) and as aerial reconnaissance drones (like Northrop Grumman’s
Global Hawk
). These were followed by the frighteningly named
Predator
and
Reaper
armed aircraft, built by General Atomics and operated by remote control thousands of kilometres away on a military base in Nevada. Joining the battle soon will be armed ground robots such as Foster-Miller’s MAARS and iRobot’s Warrior. While the idea of having robots driving
around with live guns scares some people, military experts say the evolution is a natural one that has happened with everything from cars to planes. “Almost every technology that finds itself in military service starts with reconnaissance and evolves to strike,” says iRobot’s Dyer. “It becomes so frustrating to be able to see but not to act, that it invariably moves to strike capability.”

Future Combat Systems wasn’t without its critics, however, including President Barack Obama, who inherited the program when he took office in 2009. Obama wasted no time in cutting back on FCS, and while his move was detrimental to big defence contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, it is likely to pay off even more for small robot makers over the long run. Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defence, announced in April 2009 that the government was cutting spending on “Cold War thinking”—areas of conventional warfare where the United States has a clear advantage—and would instead concentrate on new realities, like fighting the sort of urban-based counter-insurgents found in Iraq. “[Obama’s] trying to take resources from areas where we have clear dominance—we control the skies and the seas—and move them to where we’re challenged, which is irregular warfare and asymmetrical attack,” Dyer says. “Robots are an important part of being able to meet that irregular warfare challenge. You can already see that with the IED threat. It is going to shift resources to an area that is advantageous to the robotics industry and iRobot in particular.” That could mean more programs like the DARPA road races. About 80 percent of the funding for artificial intelligence research in the United States already comes from the military, a percentage that could increase with the rethinking of defence spending.
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One thing is for sure: the military’s appetite for
robots has only just been whetted and is very quickly becoming ravenous. As iRobot’s Angle points out, the military market for robots is driving two relatively new concepts into the robotics industry: utility and cost effectiveness. While large Japanese car and electronics companies master the technology and have produced some amazing robots—such as Sony’s AIBO robot dog or Honda’s humanoid ASIMO—they have so far failed to produce robots that are cheap and useful. “The Japanese industry is a lot about ‘cool.’ AIBO and ASIMO and dozens of dynamically walking robot projects were developed so that large consumer electronics firms could show they can put together an impressive robot,” Angle says. “Why is Matsushita cooler than Sony? Well, just look at their robots. It’s bragging rights and it became a huge thing. The population got into it. It’s misdirecting the Japanese into a world of show rather than a world of utility.” Japanese officials don’t disagree. “The U.S. is much better in the commercial field, but in technology, Japan is number one,” says Takayuki Toriyama, executive director of the city of Osaka’s office in Chicago. “The robotics market in Japan is not expanding right now because they’re too expensive. Nobody can afford to buy a robot. This is a very serious problem.”
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The United States is far from the only big military customer seeking cheap, useful robots. As of 2008, Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry trade group, had 1,400 corporate members in 50 nations while a survey of government-related research found that 42 countries, including Britain, Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran, were working on military robotics.
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The market for war robots is just starting to open, which means we are still at the early stages of seeing the commercial spinoffs—the Roomba was just the beginning.

A Smart Slut

While the overwhelming majority of artificial intelligence research is conducted on behalf of the military, some of it is coming from a surprising source: sex-minded criminals. Indeed, if military researchers don’t come up with a human-seeming robot intelligence soon, hackers may very well beat them to it.

Internet scams started with spam—the unwanted email, not the meat in a can, that is. As with every other innovation on the internet, the sex industry took quickly to it. Almost from the moment people started sending each other electronic messages, sex purveyors were acquiring email addresses to pitch their products. This resulted in the development of “spiders” that could trawl the web and search for email addresses and viruses that could infect inboxes and send out messages to all listed contacts. In the early days of the web, this sort of spam generally directed people to porn sites, where they would hopefully sign up for some sort of paid service. As anti-spam filters became smarter and stronger, the solicitations took ever-more complex forms. Simple spam morphed into annoying pop-up ads and then into phishing attacks, where a computer is infected by malicious code when the user clicks on a link.

In 2005, while I was living in New Zealand, I was nearly taken in by what was then the latest evolution of these scams. I had signed up to Friendster, a social-networking site that served as a precursor to the likes of MySpace and Facebook, and created a profile with all the standard information—my place of birth, age, interests and the like. While planning a visit home to Canada, I received a message from “Jen.” She said she had read my profile and was interested in becoming a journalist and asked if I wanted to catch a Blue Jays baseball game when I
was back in Toronto. Being a single guy at the time, I couldn’t believe my luck—not only had someone actually read my profile, she also shared the same interests. I checked out Jen’s profile and everything looked to be in order, so I replied and asked her to send more details about herself. She answered with a link to her website, saying there was information there. I followed the link and, sure enough, it was a site that required a paid membership to enter—clearly a well-disguised porn site. The jig was up.

After some Googling, I learned that many other men had been fooled by the same ruse. “Jen” had a different name every time, but “she” used the same script with individualized alterations gleaned from Friendster profiles. It turns out Jen was a sophisticated “bot” that was programmed to automatically scrub profiles for personal details, then try to pass itself off as a human in messages to users. Nobody ever did track down where that particular bot originated. I managed to trace the porn website as registered to a law firm in Australia, but my calls there were never returned (Jen must have met someone else).

The Friendster scam was small potatoes compared to the Slutbot, also known as “CyberLover,” that made the rounds on dating websites in 2007. The “flirting robot” was a piece of software developed by Russian hackers that could establish relationships online with ten different people in just thirty minutes. The program, which could be configured into several versions ranging from “romantic lover” to “sexual predator,” could carry on full conversations and convince people to reveal personal information by asking questions like, “Where can I send you a Valentine’s Day card?” or “What’s your date of birth? I’m planning a surprise for your birthday.”

Security specialists said the artificial intelligence built into the software was good enough that victims had a tough time distinguishing the bot from a real suitor. “As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” one security analyst said. “Internet users today are generally aware of the dangers of opening suspicious attachments and visiting URLs, but CyberLover employs a new technique that is unheard of. That’s what makes it particularly dangerous. It has been designed as a robot that lures victims automatically
without human
intervention
.”
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(My emphasis added.)

The phenomenon provoked some bloggers to declare that the Turing test, devised by legendary British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, had finally been beaten. Under Turing’s test, a computer intelligence must fool a human judge—who is actively trying to determine whether it is in fact a machine—into believing it is a human. By some measures, CyberLover had beaten the test, but as other bloggers pointed out, “studies show that when people enter a state of sexual arousal their intelligence drops precipitously.”
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Moreover, many of CyberLover’s victims were likely hoping it was a real person, and anyone in a state of sexual arousal is in no state to notice that the instigator of their excitement happens to be a computer.
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While CyberLover may not have truly beaten the Turing test, it came close enough to provoke discussion.

Such online scams are certain to improve, especially since hacking has morphed in recent years from simple teenage mischief into a big profit-driven business. “They’re really running it like a Fortune 100 company,” says Dean Turner, global intelligence director for security giant Symantec. “Criminals are
fundamentally lazy. They want to do the least amount of work to get the most financial gain. If that means they have to devote time and resources to working with groups who are working on things like artificial intelligence, they’re probably going to do that.”
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Porn You Can Feel

Disembodied artificial intelligences in the cyber-ether are great, but what happens when such programs can get up off the computer and walk around? The answer is obvious: sex robots. But before we get there, a few pieces of the hardware puzzle need to fall into place. The first piece comes from experimenters like Scott Coffman, who is what you might call a serial entrepreneur. The West Virginia native has in his lifetime drawn comics, published a board game, sold herbal supplements, invented paint-ball guns for kids and created the “Growl Towel,” a small cloth waved by fans at Carolina Panthers hockey games. After dabbling in internet porn for a few years, he finally found his calling when he launched the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network in 1999. The site took the innovative step of charging visitors for the porn they viewed on a per-minute basis, rather than the flat monthly fee most of its competitors charged. The approach worked amazingly well—AEBN has since grown into one of the busiest paid porn websites.
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Coffman says AEBN has about four hundred thousand paid customers a month, brings in about $100 million in revenue a year and is the world’s biggest video-on-demand company, in or outside of porn.
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It’s no surprise, then, that Coffman believes entrepreneurship and innovation are the solutions to weathering the downturn in the porn business. To that end, he launched the Real Touch sex
toy in 2009 as his company’s play against the encroachment of free online content. The Real Touch is about the size of a toaster, but it has the contours of a woman’s hips, which comes in handy because the device is meant to be stuck and held on the penis. The inside is lined with warmed soft silicon that is moistened by a lubricant dispenser to simulate the feel of a vagina. Motors inside the Real Touch move in sync to specially coded movies, which can be viewed online when the device is connected to a computer. The $200 device is the latest in “teledildonics,” sex toys that can interact with a computer, and Coffman is promoting it as the natural next step in porn. “Once you add the sense of touch to whatever that girl is doing to that guy in the movie, that’s well worth paying for. That is the evolution of what adult entertainment should be.”

The Real Touch uses something called haptic technology to introduce the sensation of touch to what is primarily a visual experience. It’s not unlike the force feedback found in Xbox and Playstation controllers, or even in your cellphone when it’s set to “vibrate.” A haptic device uses sensors to detect when it is touching something, then relays that information back to its user, usually in the form of a subtle vibration, thus creating the sensation of touching something remotely. Like the porn industry, mainstream Hollywood is considering haptics as a way of creating an experience that can’t be pirated. Montreal-based D-BOX Technologies, for one, is now rolling out motion-synced chairs to movie theatres in the United States and Canada. (The company also sells them for home use.) Watching a car chase, for example, takes on a whole new dimension as the D-BOX chair rollicks and rolls in sync with the action on screen.

Non-entertainment concerns such as Quanser, another Canadian company based just north of Toronto, are also experimenting with haptics in fields such as surgery. Whereas traditional robotic arms allow operators to lift and manipulate objects, they are essentially lumbering oafs that don’t convey any sense of “feel” and are ill-suited for precise or sensitive tasks. Quanser, which also builds unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for the military, has designed an arm that uses haptic force-feedback technology in its fingers to relay the sense of touch back to its operator, who can “feel” what the arm feels using a bar-like control apparatus. I tried Quanser’s hand at a robotics show in Boston, where I poked a surface with a pencil held in its grip, and it felt amazingly real. Haptic-enhanced robotics hold a world of promise, not only for surgery but also in the field of artificial limbs. Amputees have good reason to hope that they will soon be able to replace lost limbs with fully functional, “feeling” replicas. Such arms are indeed on the way, as we’ll find out in the next chapter.

The other piece of the sex-robot hardware puzzle comes from companies such as California-based Abyss Creations, which began selling the Real Doll in 1996. While sex dolls in various forms have been used since at least the seventeenth century, the Real Doll reached a new level of technological sophistication. Using “Hollywood special effects technology” to create an amazingly lifelike female doll, complete with articulated steel skeleton and soft silicone outer layer for that “ultra flesh-like feel,” the company is now selling about 350 dolls a year at $6,500 a pop.
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As of 2009 Abyss offered sixteen different female models, some of which were indistinguishable from real women, at least in the photos. The company also offered a male
version, “Charlie,” but “retired” him in 2009, with a new model in development. The dolls, of course, have all the necessary sexual openings—or appendages in Charlie’s case—and can be customized upon ordering. Those who can afford them have raved about their efficacy. “Best sex I ever had! I swear to God! This Real Doll feels better than a real woman!” exclaimed radio shock jock and sex aficionado Howard Stern.
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